This is where I am confused. I hear this, but I also keep hearing they used AI to create assets when it was first started development as placeholders for future assets. They were all replaced long before the game was ever released. I also heard that the assets used were stock unreal 5 assets which were AI generated but again replaced later long before the game released. So which is the real story?

It was released with the original placeholder AI assets, but patched out within 5 days. It's pretty clear that they just missed replacing those assets prior to release.

I don't know exactly which assets, or exactly how many... but from several article it seems one of them was a newspaper only used in the prologue, that no one would notice without directly looking at it up close, which 99.9% of people would never do, and could easily be overlooked doing final testing for game breaking issues prior to release.

And the failure to properly disclose could easily be explained by them messing around. Early in development, deciding not to use AI, and then forgetting about it. Which also explains it being left in for release accidentally. Updated assets were clearly made, just never replaced.

The disqualification had nothing to do with the assets being there for the release, it was solely about development as mentioned in every statement from the awards. Meaning even if it hadn't been there at release, they still would have been disqualified. Hard criteria like that which disqualifies any sort of context or consideration is not fair. Especially when we're talking about cutting edge technologies that teams will obviously be experimenting with before making decisions.

I agree with almost everything here, I think using LLMs to generate placeholders is fair game and allows studios to nail down the feeling of the game sooner. That being said there's one thing I disagree:

However, it is obvious to see that occasionally you'll forget to replace items with this technique

There are ways to ensure you don't forget, things like naming your placeholders placeholder_ or whatever so you ensure there are no more placeholders when you make the final build. That is the best way to approach this because even extremely obvious placeholders might be missed otherwise, since even if you have a full QA team they won't be playing every little scene from the game daily looking for that, and a few blank/pink/checkered textures on small or weird areas might be missed.

I think it's okay for studios to use generative AI for placeholders, but if one of them makes it to the release you screwed up big time. And like I said there are ways to ensure you don't, it's trivial to make a plugin for any of the major engines (and should be even easier if you're building the engine yourself) where it would alert you of placeholders in use at compile time.

That's not what a concept artist does, concept artists (if they had one) did the work before, game artists are still doing the work while the generated placeholders are in place, no person's job was compromised by using generated placeholders. That being said, if any placeholder made it into the final game then fuck them.

We're not talking about a development team of 100+ artists here and a company forcing them to work 80 hour crunch weeks leading up to launch like much of the industry.

I don't know exactly how their 30 or so team members break down for specialties, but I'm willing to bet we're talking maybe 5 asset artists. Making the tens or hundreds of thousands of concept art pieces, and in game assets. Their time is finite and much better spent working on final assets than making placeholders that will just be replaced later. Experimenting with AI and dripping a placeholder in during month 6 that never gets touched again, and the final asset is made but missed when swapping them in at the end of development isn't exactly damning

Literally removing work from a human(concept artist)

It's not really "removing" work from a human, it's utilizing the time of a very small and limited team more wisely. The AI didn't replace a human, there was never going to be an additional person hired just to make that placeholder, at worst it just let the existing artists spend more time making final assets.

Ah gotcha, article is just written poorly then.

Dude, it was 2022. AI was nothing back then. Certainly not something that people were debating the morality of at the time. It was a new tool. A developer tried it out for a few very minor assets that were only meant to be placeholders. This was't "literally removing work from a human(concept artist)". FFS, it probably was the concept artist who used it!

Like imagine a new type of paint comes out that's supposed to spread on canvas better. An artist gets some and tries a few test strokes on a blank canvas, goes "huh, interesting", and then paints over it entirely with traditional paint. Then, the public turns against the new paint. Maybe it's made from orphan blood, maybe it causes cancer; it doesn't matter why, but it is now heavily frowned upon to use it. An art studio displaying the original artists work puts out a claim that none of their art uses the new type of paint. Were they lying? Like, ya technically I guess, but if you can't see the nuance and understand how such a thing could happen, then your logic is less that of a human, and more that of a machine.

i can see how this would happen though: marketing team simplistically asks about AI assets, dev team says no because it’s not in the final product that they’re aware of, and that miscommunication is exactly that: neither team is trying to be dishonest, it’s just that some information got lost along the way

their award should have been rescinded for sure

but also that shouldn’t tarnish the reputation of the studio going forward as long as they apologise and it was legitimately internal miscommunication rather than an attempt to deceive

No, I said nuance is important. That's why I don't think the devs are villains. But logically you can't get a "no AI" award if you used AI. It's be like entering a handknitted blanket contest and using a machine to start the first row. It's not "100% handmade" anymore.

I played the game very shortly after release and I read all the newspapers. There was a lot of storytelling going on in them and they definitely weren’t this. Was some prerelease build or placeholder texture? Because if so, this controversy is pedantic, puritanical, witch-hunting garbage, and I say that as someone who is violently anti-AI.

more like fighting against the ai slop. Such huge controversy should make other companies think again before using ai for creative process. Its either this or having more and more ai slop, voting with your vallet is the new pull your self up by your shoestrings.

The problem with using AI textures is that at a glance they look like the real thing. So it's not always easy for QA to spot that a texture hasn't been swapped out. The thing is it's also super easy to deal with that, you just put all the AI textures in a temporary folder and then when you think you already to ship the game, delete that folder and see if you get any bright purple broken textures showing up.

Most game engines will let you set the missing texture to be something truly awful and very obvious.

They already had the replacement assets created upon release, but forgot to swap them out and it was missed in QA. That's why, pretty much as soon as they discovered it, they got it all replaced just 5 days after release.

It's pretty common for games to mistakenly release with minor assets still as placeholders instead of the official version. Who's really going to look at something like the texture of a rock and be like "Wait just a minute! That's not the official rock texture!"

The more you learn about this, the more understandable it is. The only people mad are those who don't know the whole story, or those that are just looking for an excuse to be mad, no matter how dumb the excuse.

That's a fair point, Skong was made by like 3 people and it's probably one of the best games of all time — tons of love in the game.

While there's no doubt that they have technically break the rules, just the fact that they afaik patched the few textures before this controversy (as far as I know, it's possible that it was a reaction to this?), this simply sounds like a (very succesful) PR attempt by Indie Game Awards.

There's no doubt that Clair Obscire isn't a AI slop that cheapened on artists or art with GenAI, whis is the spirit of the rules IGA has. If you don't take the rules literaly, they deserve the award. And that's IMO important.

I've never heard about IGA before this, so it worked to draw attention to them.

I'm very OK with having rules in place to reject work where you replaced artists with AI. But this is not the case.